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I am very new to the Rasperry Pi and I am installing Raspbian in Headless manner.

I have the following question. I have to write the Raspbian image on my SD card using the dd Linux command.

The question is: what file system does my SD card have to be before I can write Raspbian to it with dd? Currently my SD card is formatted in FAT32 but I think that this is not good.

What is the standard file system? Is it ext3?

And what can I do to format it in the right file system using Linux?

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1 Answer 1

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dd command, when used correctly, OVERWRITES all partition information along with the partition formats and everything else you might put on SD card. therefore, it does not matter, how SD card was formatted because it's going to be overwritten anyway.

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  • you mean that no matter the file system used before (ext1,2,3,4, fat16,32, ntfs) dd erase partition table. so after that, what file system did we get when dd is used.?????? thanks
    – bouqbouq
    May 26, 2014 at 20:26
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    cat /etc/fstab says there are 2 partitions, /dev/mmcblk0p1 is formatted as vfat and /dev/mmcblk0p2 is formatted as ext4.
    – lenik
    May 26, 2014 at 20:29
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    @Makouda When you run the dd command it overwrites everything, like lenik said. It creates the correct partition type from the contents of the .img file.
    – RPiAwesomeness
    Sep 17, 2014 at 19:08
  • See also my answer in this duplicate question: raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/23288/8015
    – Amedee Van Gasse
    Jun 20, 2016 at 7:32

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